To a journalist, a presidential election year is kind of like Christmas morning to a six-year-old — as the event gets closer, conversation, planning, and feverish anticipation accelerates to an obsessive frenzy. To a great degree, it’s all they can think about.

But there is one piece of advice I give my friends, colleagues, and clients every four years: In planning, please keep in mind that there will be more than one story this election year.

I spend most of my time in the audio space, consulting with organizations about podcasts and radio or helping them make projects to extend their presence in audio. And even though podcasting has had a rough year for revenue (though listening continues to grow), the basic reason people listen to podcasts and other forms of digital audio remains largely unchanged: They listen to escape. Sometimes that means to literally get away from the news and information that bombards their day (which explains why podcasting and audiobook listening times tend to be the opposite of radio’s morning-heavy usage — as the day goes on, more and more people tune out of the day’s news and into spoken word like podcasts). But most times the escape is more like a pause to stretch the mind in other directions — a change of pace. Listeners remain smart and interested in learning more, or are just looking for some fun or an intriguing point of view — but they still see it as a break from what the world is throwing at them that day.

You may be wondering how this is true when most top podcast lists routinely include newsy offerings like The Daily, Up First, or The News Agents. First, there are no absolutes in a broad and dynamic industry like podcasting. Second, when you weigh the audience and time spent with news podcasts compared to non-news podcasts, you see that the traditional definition of “news” actually occupies only a small wedge in the industry’s pie chart compared to other genres and categories.

This explains why so many outlets moved quickly to produce daily or weekly podcasts related to fast-moving impactful single stories like the wars in Gaza or Ukraine…and found that not a lot of listeners tuned in. There was an initial spark of interest that quickly faded after the initial sampling. They didn’t attract or retain audience because they didn’t match what most people are seeking from the medium. A general audience is not looking for more news about war. They are looking for an emotional and intellectual break from things like war. (A notable exception is that podcasting is a great way to connect passionate communities of interest — and there most certainly are many uses for podcasting as a way to connect communities concerned about a war in a way that’s much deeper and personal than the general audience.)

So to swing this back to the presidential election year, when strategic editorial decisions are made about how to deploy podcasting resources for 2024, every news organization should realize that its audience needs more from them than incremental news of the day, the latest polling, and endless opinions on the state of play. Either plan to talk about the election in markedly different terms than others (take inspiration from Jay Rosen’s “Not the odds, but the stakes” advice to election journalists), or set aside resources to cover stories that provide that escape. Your readers, users, and audience are smart. They don’t stop being smart when they need a break.

Back in 1966, when the Carnegie Commission was defining what we would come to know as public broadcasting, the author E. B. White was asked if he had any ideas about how the new tools of media could help elevate the civic dialogue and experience in the U.S. His response has benefit for anyone in media, far beyond public broadcasting. White offered that media focused on excellence “should arouse our dreams, satisfy our hunger for beauty, take us on journeys, enable us to participate in events, present great drama and music, explore the sea and the sky and the woods and the hills. It should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky’s, and our Camelot.”

This election year will be brutal and demanding, for us, our audience, the entire country, and our democracy as a whole. While our work to cover the election is essential, so is using our skills to serve our audience’s need to think about something else, feel something else, be challenged by something else, and make the world feel a little smaller, more connected, and maybe even less complicated.